Date: April 19th, 2023
Location: State College, PA
It’s getting sooner and sooner before my trip! I’m super excited (and just about ready for this semester to be over) so I’m extremely happy it’s coming up soon! This seems like it might be the second-to-last or possibly even the last journal I have to write before the trip. Not much happened again for these past couple of weeks in terms of preparation, but I did take a new course to prepare for the project on the trip so I can about talk about that and the questions I had to answer for this week's journal prompt!
I took a little online course that focused on teaching people about a data visualization tool called Tableau. I had never heard of it before the class, but it seems to be decently popular. Tableau is pretty much a data visualization tool. It’s good for making details and interactive graphs, charts, and things. I had some experience with making data visualization before and a lot of the general knowledge this course went over about making good designs were already things that I had heard of before. But the Tableau program itself? That was completely new to me.
While Tableau seems like a really good tool to know how to use, it still feels a bit too complex for me. You have access to a lot of different things in Tableau. All you have to do is upload your data and then you can edit it to make it how you want. From charts to interactive dashboards that help you go into more detail about the visualization you’re making. While I honestly find simpler programs like Canva easier, Tableau is super powerful. Looking at all the data visualizations made with Tableau, I realized just how much potential data visualization has and it really made me appreciate that some visualizations are good, some are bad, and some are downright horrible. Aside from that, I feel like I just learned how to use the Tableau program. Even though I finished the program and got the certificate, I feel like I barely scratched the surface of that program and just all its different buttons and tools.
I want to be a climatologist, so I think I’ll definitely have a chance of making a lot of data visualizations in my field- especially to help other people around me understand what I’m researching. Just in general, I think I’d possibly end up making graphs that show changes over time such as temperatures or maybe greenhouse gas concentrations. I think there’s a chance I might end up making visualization for two main audiences. One group would be my peers who would know about as much as I do and just need a chart to maybe show patterns in the data that we found. Another group would be people who want to learn about climatology but are not experts at all in the field. Those visualizations would also show patterns, but they would likely be more simplified so that way people with varying levels of understanding and education could understand them.
And overall, having those graphs can just really make those changes more visible and easily understandable. After all, you can only get oh-but so much information by just reading a 200-row-long Excel sheet of numbers. So being able to see the data in a more visual format (especially one that allows you to click on and interact with individual data points) just allows people to better understand and make connections to what they’re seeing.
But yeah! That’s it for now. But we’re getting so much closer every day so I know I won’t have to wait much longer to enjoy this experience. But I guess this is where I’m ending this journal! See you next time!
- DD
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